Paraphrased XP from the book/review: "XP is obsessed with Fear and Courage -- you must have Courage to do XP, and if you oppose it, it's because you're Afraid of it. "
CMMI tutorial: "Adopter Types: Innovators Early Adopters Early Majority Late Majority Laggards"
The Innovators will be the first to embrace CMMI and the Laggards will be the last.
The The Emperor's New Clothes: "Their colours and patterns, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the clothes made of their material possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid."
That's like saying you aren't using traditional programming because you didn't get all the requirements written down correctly before coding began.
The question of how easy or difficult it is to get people to follow the rules of a methodology is a legimate measure of that methodology's effectiveness.
Pair programming itself is based on the idea that an individual programmer can be a bit lazy and thus not double-check their work. Well, when you pair to lazy people together there's no guarentee that they will be more diligent together then they were apart.
"You keep using this word "customer". I don't think it means, what you think it means".
The golden rule applies. You know: "The one with the gold makes the rules".
It's not fair, but if you tell your customer or manager that he has the responsibility because you're using eXtreme Programming, you won't be using it very much longer (assuming you still have a job).
But "hacker" is a word that doesn't even have a single meaning among geeks.
The original MIT meaning was someone who was driven to passionately persue their area of interest as an intense hobby rather than being paid for it (in grades or money). That hobby wouldn't necessary concern computers.
On Slashdot a hacker often means someone who reverse-engineers a computing device and then uses that knowledge to do something that the system wasn't orginally intended to do as in "They hacked the XBox and made it run Linux".
You'll notice that the Slashdot definition fits "cracker" behavior better than the original definition.
Perhaps, you're not considering the difference between OO programming and OO design? Admittedly, the situation described barely qualifies as OO progamming but I think it squeaks by.
In any case, this whole discussion is about putting Java on your Resume when you don't really know it. The post I was commenting on claimed that you didn't know Java unless you were doing OO programming (as he understood it). I disagree.
You can know Java and successfully write code in in it without doing OO design. I wouldn't recommend it, but someone who does has the right to put Java on their Resume. They don't have the right to put OO design on their Resume, however.
There are plenty of ways that Gates can protect MS's IP that are cheaper and more effective than helping to buy AIDS drugs in Africa. The only context in which MS's IP is at any kind of risk has to do with anti-trust, and I don't see how drug company patents are going to help there.
Furthermore, there's no proof that Gate's money is deterring countries from allowing generic versions of AIDS drugs and in fact a number of countries have already taken that step.
If you were an AIDS patient in Africa would you want to sacrifice yourself for an experiment to determine if a lack of drug money would accelerate the process of developing generic alternatives?
There are two fundamental ways to go. Kludge current OS's like Unix/Linux or Windows into the future or throw out backward compatibility and use our best knowledge to create brand new systems.
The fact that the open source guys chose the former rather than the latter approach despite the fact that they have total freedom and don't have to answer to anybody for quarterly profits indicates that we will be tweaking old systems for a long time to come.
I heard that MS got the pharmaceutical companies to give free drugs to Open Source developers to slow down the competition too. By the way, have you been working on any Open Source projects lately...
Perhaps you're thinking about digital TVs. Having an OS in a mainstream TV seems like the height of overkill to me.
When I was a kid, transistor radio makers would charge according to how many transistors the radio had. In some cases, however, most of the transistors were unity gain amplifiers that were added to pad the price. Perhaps someday consumer electronics companies will advertise, "Powered by Linux" but not actual run it.
It's great. We don't have any standard (or data for that matter) for measuring coding skills but that doesn't stop anyone from giving us the "statistics".
My experience is that those rare insane programmers are great for writing last minute demo code for a show, but you wouldn't want to trust them with any mission critical code.
"In the early days programmers who physicists, engineers, and mathamaticians."
You must be talking about the very early days. This hasn't been true for over 40 years. Cobol was created in 1959 and it's not particularly known for its use by the above professions.
So unless you think nothing else has happened in the programming world for the last 40 years, I wouldn't base too many conclusions on your fundamental assumption.
"I have seen too many "old school" developers who havn't the foggiest idea about OO who think they can code in Java because they know the syntax."
I guess what you meant was that these "old school" developers don't take full advantage of OO capabilities. If they know Java syntax, I think that pretty much means they can code in Java. Since any Java program that produces an output uses objects, they must be doing OO programming as well.
I disagree. Some projects are more complex than others by their very nature. A bad solution can add additional complexity, but an elegant solution cannot reduce the complexity below that which is inherent in the problem.
It's not surprising that hardware makers that haven't hitched their wagon to the PC gravy train would be more willing to look elsewhere for a market.
For existing PC hardware manufacturers the question is whether the potential market is large enough to justify the additional support and development costs. If there is sufficient profit to be made these companies will eventually come around.
An embedded system used to mean a system in which software didn't run from RAM, was severly resource limited, and in many cases, had to run with predicatable timing. It was also limited to solving a specific problem. In those systems, porting a conventional OS like Unix or Windows was totally out of the question.
The current definition seems to be a general purpose computing device that is no larger than a PC. Given this new definition, it's no surprise that Linux is dominant since it is free (as in beer) and backward compatibilty with Windows is not an issue.
Still in those projects where embedded really means something, I don't think Linux, Windows CE or any other standard OS can cut it.
PacMan sucked primarily because it's a game that is particularly hard to do on the 2600. The best looking games (done by Activision and others) were designed around the 2600's limitations.
One of the limitations was that you couldn't have more then two independently-moving high-resolution objects in the same horizontal scan line without using tricks. PacMan multiplexed it's objects while games like Pitfall were designed to avoid the situation all together.
"Well, since we are the government WE are paying for the development of software, and yet WE don't get access ot that source"
There are many goods and services that the government buys without receiving any IP, what's so special about software? To be consistent, shouldn't we demand the design specs to the office equipment, vehicles, recipes, etc that the government buys. Perhaps we should also be able to obtain personal information about anyone that works for the government, since we are paying their salary. Where does it all end?
Your history is a little confused. There were dozens of companies that flooded the market with Atari 2600 games, not just Atari. Atari tried everything to stop it including suing former employees, but it didn't work.
In addition, there was the Intellivision and Coleco game systems (among others) that died during the same period.
It's funny that you cast Nintendo as some kind of hero. It would be as if you had to get permission from MS to write SW for Windows.
"The biggest problem with all of this "ease of use" crap that Microsoft and Macintosh are spewing into the advertising arena is that your average user now wants their computer to be a toaster."
Actually, I think they got this idea from Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison.
Well, this would be more like Al Capone being issued a parking ticket. Seriously though, comparing Al Copone to MS is a bit over the top, don't you think?
As in the US antitrust case, these sanctions are remedies based on a false set of assumptions so the end result will not make anti-MS zealots happy.
In both cases, the legal efforts were driven by competitors who wanted to rub something, anything in Bill's face. They were hoping that they'd be able to break MS up, but failing that, they were left with remedies that don't mean much.
In the US case, for example, were Sun or Oracle really held up in their competition against MS because of secret API's? Have they added any new functionality to their products based on the new information?
In the EU case, forcing MS to provide a Media-Player-free version of Windows is unlikely to have a substantial impact on MS's market share in Europe. Just as the claim that IE was going to allow MS to take over the Internet turned out to be specious, so will similar claims for Media Player.
"I find it all to convenient that the majority of people who fled to Canada came back once the war was over. To me that still reeks of cowardice and self-serving interest."
Self-interest is exactly what freedom is all about. You don't think all those people fled Europe and came to America to make a philosphical point do you?
What I find convenient is that someone for whom this important decision is merely a theoretical one is so quick to pass judgment on those that had to face it in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
For your consideration the following passages:
Paraphrased XP from the book/review:
"XP is obsessed with Fear and Courage -- you must have Courage to do XP, and if you oppose it, it's because you're Afraid of it. "
CMMI tutorial:
"Adopter Types:
Innovators
Early Adopters
Early Majority
Late Majority
Laggards"
The Innovators will be the first to embrace CMMI and the Laggards will be the last.
The The Emperor's New Clothes:
"Their colours and patterns, they said, were not only exceptionally beautiful, but the clothes made of their material possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid."
Do you see a pattern here?
That's like saying you aren't using traditional programming because you didn't get all the requirements written down correctly before coding began.
The question of how easy or difficult it is to get people to follow the rules of a methodology is a legimate measure of that methodology's effectiveness.
Pair programming itself is based on the idea that an individual programmer can be a bit lazy and thus not double-check their work. Well, when you pair to lazy people together there's no guarentee that they will be more diligent together then they were apart.
"You keep using this word "customer". I don't think it means, what you think it means".
The golden rule applies. You know: "The one with the gold makes the rules".
It's not fair, but if you tell your customer or manager that he has the responsibility because you're using eXtreme Programming, you won't be using it very much longer (assuming you still have a job).
But "hacker" is a word that doesn't even have a single meaning among geeks.
The original MIT meaning was someone who was driven to passionately persue their area of interest as an intense hobby rather than being paid for it (in grades or money). That hobby wouldn't necessary concern computers.
On Slashdot a hacker often means someone who reverse-engineers a computing device and then uses that knowledge to do something that the system wasn't orginally intended to do as in "They hacked the XBox and made it run Linux".
You'll notice that the Slashdot definition fits "cracker" behavior better than the original definition.
Perhaps, you're not considering the difference between OO programming and OO design? Admittedly, the situation described barely qualifies as OO progamming but I think it squeaks by.
In any case, this whole discussion is about putting Java on your Resume when you don't really know it. The post I was commenting on claimed that you didn't know Java unless you were doing OO programming (as he understood it). I disagree.
You can know Java and successfully write code in in it without doing OO design. I wouldn't recommend it, but someone who does has the right to put Java on their Resume. They don't have the right to put OO design on their Resume, however.
"Who's living in an alternate universe?"
It's still you.
There are plenty of ways that Gates can protect MS's IP that are cheaper and more effective than helping to buy AIDS drugs in Africa. The only context in which MS's IP is at any kind of risk has to do with anti-trust, and I don't see how drug company patents are going to help there.
Furthermore, there's no proof that Gate's money is deterring countries from allowing generic versions of AIDS drugs and in fact a number of countries have already taken that step.
If you were an AIDS patient in Africa would you want to sacrifice yourself for an experiment to determine if a lack of drug money would accelerate the process of developing generic alternatives?
There are two fundamental ways to go. Kludge current OS's like Unix/Linux or Windows into the future or throw out backward compatibility and use our best knowledge to create brand new systems.
The fact that the open source guys chose the former rather than the latter approach despite the fact that they have total freedom and don't have to answer to anybody for quarterly profits indicates that we will be tweaking old systems for a long time to come.
I heard that MS got the pharmaceutical companies to give free drugs to Open Source developers to slow down the competition too. By the way, have you been working on any Open Source projects lately ...
If open source == public domain, you're correct.
Perhaps you're thinking about digital TVs. Having an OS in a mainstream TV seems like the height of overkill to me.
When I was a kid, transistor radio makers would charge according to how many transistors the radio had. In some cases, however, most of the transistors were unity gain amplifiers that were added to pad the price. Perhaps someday consumer electronics companies will advertise, "Powered by Linux" but not actual run it.
It's great. We don't have any standard (or data for that matter) for measuring coding skills but that doesn't stop anyone from giving us the "statistics".
My experience is that those rare insane programmers are great for writing last minute demo code for a show, but you wouldn't want to trust them with any mission critical code.
"In the early days programmers who physicists, engineers, and mathamaticians."
You must be talking about the very early days. This hasn't been true for over 40 years. Cobol was created in 1959 and it's not particularly known for its use by the above professions.
So unless you think nothing else has happened in the programming world for the last 40 years, I wouldn't base too many conclusions on your fundamental assumption.
"I have seen too many "old school" developers who havn't the foggiest idea about OO who think they can code in Java because they know the syntax."
I guess what you meant was that these "old school" developers don't take full advantage of OO capabilities. If they know Java syntax, I think that pretty much means they can code in Java. Since any Java program that produces an output uses objects, they must be doing OO programming as well.
I disagree. Some projects are more complex than others by their very nature. A bad solution can add additional complexity, but an elegant solution cannot reduce the complexity below that which is inherent in the problem.
It's not surprising that hardware makers that haven't hitched their wagon to the PC gravy train would be more willing to look elsewhere for a market.
For existing PC hardware manufacturers the question is whether the potential market is large enough to justify the additional support and development costs. If there is sufficient profit to be made these companies will eventually come around.
An embedded system used to mean a system in which software didn't run from RAM, was severly resource limited, and in many cases, had to run with predicatable timing. It was also limited to solving a specific problem. In those systems, porting a conventional OS like Unix or Windows was totally out of the question.
The current definition seems to be a general purpose computing device that is no larger than a PC. Given this new definition, it's no surprise that Linux is dominant since it is free (as in beer) and backward compatibilty with Windows is not an issue.
Still in those projects where embedded really means something, I don't think Linux, Windows CE or any other standard OS can cut it.
PacMan sucked primarily because it's a game that is particularly hard to do on the 2600. The best looking games (done by Activision and others) were designed around the 2600's limitations.
One of the limitations was that you couldn't have more then two independently-moving high-resolution objects in the same horizontal scan line without using tricks. PacMan multiplexed it's objects while games like Pitfall were designed to avoid the situation all together.
"Well, since we are the government WE are paying for the development of software, and yet WE don't get access ot that source"
There are many goods and services that the government buys without receiving any IP, what's so special about software? To be consistent, shouldn't we demand the design specs to the office equipment, vehicles, recipes, etc that the government buys. Perhaps we should also be able to obtain personal information about anyone that works for the government, since we are paying their salary. Where does it all end?
I've been staring at this RJ45 plug all morning and haven't been able to see any TV, just snow.
Your history is a little confused. There were dozens of companies that flooded the market with Atari 2600 games, not just Atari. Atari tried everything to stop it including suing former employees, but it didn't work.
In addition, there was the Intellivision and Coleco game systems (among others) that died during the same period.
It's funny that you cast Nintendo as some kind of hero. It would be as if you had to get permission from MS to write SW for Windows.
"The biggest problem with all of this "ease of use" crap that Microsoft and Macintosh are spewing into the advertising arena is that your average user now wants their computer to be a toaster."
Actually, I think they got this idea from Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison.
Well, this would be more like Al Capone being issued a parking ticket. Seriously though, comparing Al Copone to MS is a bit over the top, don't you think?
"IE killed Netscape".
How many failed businesses do you know where the owner walked away with millions of dollars in his pocket?
If you're familiar with the movie "Brewster's Millions", I'd say Marc Andreessen invoked the "wimp clause".
Get used to disappointment.
As in the US antitrust case, these sanctions are remedies based on a false set of assumptions so the end result will not make anti-MS zealots happy.
In both cases, the legal efforts were driven by competitors who wanted to rub something, anything in Bill's face. They were hoping that they'd be able to break MS up, but failing that, they were left with remedies that don't mean much.
In the US case, for example, were Sun or Oracle really held up in their competition against MS because of secret API's? Have they added any new functionality to their products based on the new information?
In the EU case, forcing MS to provide a Media-Player-free version of Windows is unlikely to have a substantial impact on MS's market share in Europe. Just as the claim that IE was going to allow MS to take over the Internet turned out to be specious, so will similar claims for Media Player.
"I find it all to convenient that the majority of people who fled to Canada came back once the war was over. To me that still reeks of cowardice and self-serving interest."
Self-interest is exactly what freedom is all about. You don't think all those people fled Europe and came to America to make a philosphical point do you?
What I find convenient is that someone for whom this important decision is merely a theoretical one is so quick to pass judgment on those that had to face it in the real world.